The most heroic Jewish uprising against centuries of Europe’s brutal oppression was at the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 against monstrous Nazi occupation forces. From 1939 to mid-1942, they had forcibly packed over 3,00,000 Jews into a 3.3 square kilometre area of the Polish capital city. From July to September 1942, the German Wehrmacht and SS deported 2,50,000 from the Jewish ghetto to be murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp. Before the mass removal, 15,000 had already been killed through deliberate starvation and disease.
Of some 50,000 left in the ghetto, in a desperate act of defiance, several resistance groups secretly gathered arms and rose up to fight the combined might of the German war machine on April 19, 1943, and continued their heroic but futile battle for a month till May 16 when they were crushed by the overwhelming tanks, artillery and flame-throwers of the enemy.
Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the handful of Jewish fighters who survived, was asked many years later about the lessons that could be learned from the uprising. “If there is a school to study the human spirit, the uprising should be a major subject,” he replied.
In the Palestinian ghetto of Gaza, 2.3 million packed into an area of 365 square kilometres, have barely existed since 1967 through a military occupation and a subsequent air, sea and land blockade by Israel and its camp follower Egypt. This has effectively cut them off from the rest of the world. In July 2010 during a visit to Turkey, David Cameron, then the British prime minister and now the Foreign Minister, said, “Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp”.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth with dismal living conditions created by a cruel economic and commercial blockade. It has a very high youth unemployment rate of 70% together with one of the globe’s highest literacy rates. This has formed an explosive mixture of frustration and deep anger. Hamas has arisen in these conditions and launched a fierce assault on Israel.
In turn, Israel has wreaked its vengeance by flattening much of Gaza and killing at least 18,000 of its hapless people with over 32,000 tonnes of high explosive bombs, largely supplied by the United States. Eighty years on, the kin of the oppressed of Warsaw have become the ruthless oppressors of Gaza where Zuckerman’s “human spirit” endures.
Jawid Laiq has headed a human rights research team at Amnesty International, London.